Siphnos is a Greek island in the Cycladic cluster. It is small,
both in terms of physical size and population. And it modestly
"hides its assets from passing ferry passengers behind a curtain of
high barren hills."

Herodotus mentions Siphnos in The Histories. It was one of the
wealthiest Greek islands by 600 B.C.E. because of bountiful silver and
gold mines. The agora and town hall were decorated in expensive Parian
marble. And the island had a treasury dedicated to Apollo at Delphi.
Siphnos kept the treasury abundant with a yearly tithing of revenues and
distributed gold and silver from the mines to its islanders. A popular
account, often incorrectly attributed to Pausanias, relates that the
tithing was paid in the form of a solid gold egg.

A bloom cycle starts. A peculiar blue spatters across the opposite
hill one afternoon. Two weeks later, the blue is gone, and deep purple
skirts the porch.

By June, half the green dries to a duller shade. Stone walls and
terraces stitch the hillsides together. From a peak, the stonework looks
like steel webbing cast to outline patches of land.

We cannot know why Siphnos's ruin came--or even what form it
took.

According to the popular version, the Siphnians began offering as
their Delphic tithing not a solid gold egg, but a gold-plated one.

Apollo's anger would have blazed.

Pausanias tells us, more generally, that the island neglected to
send its tithing "through [an] immoderate desire of accumulating
wealth." As a result, the gold mines were lost in a destructive
flood. According to Herodotus, when the Siphnians were building their
treasury, they asked the oracle if their good fortune would continue.
The Sibyl replied:

When on Siphnos the town hall turns white
And so do the brows of the square, then the wise man must beware
The ambush of wood and the red messenger.

The Siphnians did not connect the prophecy's white town hall
with the Parian marble with which theirs was decorated. Nor did they
suspect the Samian's vermilion-painted ship that later arrived
bearing messengers, of sorts.

The Samians plundered the mines. The piracy may be how the island
took its name--from the common noun [TEXTO IRREPRODUCIBLE EN ASCII],
meaning "empty."

In her Prolegomena, lane Ellen Harrison distinguishes between the
different rituals of tendance and aversion. The Olympian deities were
generally worshipped in a religion of "cheerful tendance."
Their motto, Harrison writes, was essentially, "I give that you may
give." The Chthonic gods, however, were worshipped in religious
acts of aversion. They are the gods of the earth and underworld who are
placated and sent away. The creed of aversion is "I give that you
may go, and keep away." The religion of riddance is informed not by
joy as in that of tendance but by fear and superstition.

About the time when the Siphnian mines were devastated by pirates
or floods, the Olympian gods lacked characteristics that we now consider
essential to religion, such as mysticism. In the Euthyphro, Socrates
sums it up: "Holiness is then an art in which gods and men do
business with each other." In this conception of worship, there is
no fear but also no sense of the supernatural. It is a rather dry
exchange.

A Young girl says that Siphnos is closer to the sun than anywhere
else on Earth.

Where does she get her idea? Perhaps she relays an antiquated
mythological conception-probably substituting "Siphnos" for
"Greece."

Still more likely, she has found a hyperbole that sufficiently
expresses her pride and confidence in the superlativeness of her home.

Any website's description of Siphnos will likely use the
phrase "the light of Apollo" to describe the sunlight that
bathes the island. "The island of Apollo." "Apollonian
light." "So small an island / yet touched by the
infinite." "Hail soul of islands, divine flower / Stairway to
Heaven of gold and glory /Within you exist opaline light and great white
wings." "The brilliance of Apollo."

We may think of the Siphnian tithing as tendance--wealth given so
that good fortune could be received in return. If the Siphnians stopped
offering tithing, it would amount to bad business. Apollo would have no
incentive to stop a flood. And if they had the hubris to try fooling a
god with a gilded egg, they'd have been gunning for ruin.

Herodotus's version is different. The Siphnians engaged in bad
business not with Apollo but with their marauders. The Samians asked to
borrow ten talents. The Siphnians refused, and the Samians pirated over
a hundred talents. The island's refusal turned a small price into a
large one.

Yet their dealing with the Samians is less striking than their
inability to interpret a seemingly obvious prophecy. Does their
hermeneutieal ineptitude point to moral inadequacy? Surely it was in the
oracle's best interest for the island to interpret the prophecy
correctly. After all, the Siphnians' inability to do so slighted
Apollo's treasury.

While rituals of tendance and aversion seem mutually exclusive,
Harrison examines several Olympian festivals and finds connected to them
ceremonies that "have little or nothing to do with the particular
Olympian to whom they are supposed to be addressed; that they are not in
the main rites of burnt-sacrifice, of joy and feasting and agonistic
contests, but rites of a gloomy underworld character, connected mainly
with purification and the worship of ghosts." In the Apollonian
Anthesteria ceremonies, for example, there were superstitious rituals,
human sacrifices, and placation of ghosts.

Ceremonies of riddance were held for such ehthonic gods as the
winds. Despite wind's association with the upper air, sacrifices to
the winds were buried so that they would be placated to remain in the
underworld.

While the tithing to Apollo seems like tendance, ceremonies of its
antithetical counterpart could have been performed. What gods might the
Siphnians have been trying to avert? Perhaps the misfortune of the flood
or the pirates resulted from what Siphnos couldn't ward away.
Perhaps they feared certain chthonic spirits imperfectly.

Such a reading is superstitious.

Below the veranda, stone steps down to an olive tree. Barefoot over
echinated weeds, a field of olive pits.

One low, thick branch perfectly parallel to the ground, reaching
east as if toward first light.

Sitting or, more often, standing on the branch.

Out over blue expanse. Locked in looking.

amore modern Siphnos successfully thwarted a pirate invasion. A
surviving seventeenth-century manuscript written by Parthenios
Chairetis, a Greek Orthodox monk, relates considerable history
concerning Siphnos's church Panagia Chrysopigi--literally
"Virgin Mary of the Golden Spring." The church is named after
an Orthodox iconographic form of Mary as the Font of Life. Her golden
statue was purportedly found by fishermen who harvested it in their nets
from the depths of the Aegean. Today thirty-five miracles have been
attributed to her, one of the most significant of which is the
protection she offered from pirates.

The monastery Chrysopigi sits on a solid rock island. From even a
relatively short distance, the island seems connected to the peninsula
behind it, but there is a ten-or-so-foot-wide split between the two. A
guidebook says, "the stark white monastery of the Virgin standing
on the split rock looks like a moored ship preparing to set sail on the
seas." Legend has it that pirates came ashore nearby and gave chase
to a group of nuns. The sisters ran to Chrysopigi praying for
protection, and just as the nuns reached its door the ground rumbled and
the peninsula rent in half. The pirates fell into the chasm and drowned.

A small bridge now connects the island and peninsula.

Every year Siphnos celebrates the Virgin s miracle on the eve o
1_22 the Feast of the Ascension. The islanders ceremonially transport
the icon around Siphnos from the port town Kamares to Chrysopigi. After
Mary's statue of the Colden Spring arrives, a priest says Mass.
Visiting Athenians and residents occupy a long dining hall in shifts,
enjoying local wine and the island's traditional clay-baked
revithada. Attendants express gratitude by boisterously banging
silverware and chanting panegyras.

Revelers dance and drink until morning.

The dance of Boreas, the north wind, is an ancient ritual that
lives on through the island's festivities. Generally performed by a
priest, the dance thanks the north wind for ceasing its winter barrage
and propitiates it, that it might keep away.

Old man walking stiffly on bare feet with his pants rolled halfway
up his shins. Bloodshot eyes, shirt half open, carrying a walking stick.
Spitfire with an explosion of white hair. Over gravel to fill his tin
pail at a well.